Word Wednesday: The Actress

This week Word Wednesday shall feature an original piece of work from yours truely dredged up from the archives of yesteryear. I uncovered this poem whilst trawling through my old deviantART account. Do you guys remember deviantART? Some of you probably still use it, am I right? I haven't used it in ages, and some of the stuff I posted on there is, well it's less than brilliant. But it's also nice to see how far I've come with my writing in the last two years, most of which I can attribute to my dear writing circle, my classes with Francesca Lia Block, and constant practice. I think I've written more in these past two years than all years prior! And I've never been more determined to finish my novel! Hooray!

This poem was posted on the 16th of February, 2010! And although there are quite a few things I would like to change, like my overuse of bracketed lines for starters, overall I still really like how this poem feels. I'm posting it, in all it's pre polished glory, so I hope you like undiluted borderline teen/twenties angst!


The Actress

The actress
Dipped her fingers in ink
And used them as a pen
To write love words on his body
Because she could not find her voice
It got buried under all the stories told
To her by starlet women with perfect boyfriends
Who only existed in their minds
Varying personas painted on crumbling marble statues
Clouded by a masochistic martini
Of gin and gossip

They say she loved too strongly
Because she was in the theatre – she was too dramatic
Too emotive, they said
As if emotion could be measured in units
And used by prospective men to asses
And reject her
But do not mistake this for lack of passion, oh no
Passion and pathos are a winning combination
Yet, it must be executed with style and grace
In costume in character and a perfect script
He will sweep her off her feet because he knows
She will not fall
And she will kiss him because she knows he will not leave
Until the curtain falls

There is this perfect portrait of the real world
Outside her dressing room window – a crumbling wall,
Painted candy pink bruise purple and ocean green
Dripping in words with such a domineering presence they seem to scream at you
But mean nothing
A rusted shopping trolley – no point no destination
An empty bottle of vodka and a broken fit – no feeling, no reaction.
No story, no script
And with all this solid suffocating emptiness
There's not much room for her emotions here
It is only on the stage and screen where the air is clear
Enough for her to let the love run free
Like a plague of locusts.

How do we go back to the way it way it was before
we kissed the boys we shouldn't have kissed?
Before we loved girls we should never have loved
Wrote the right words to the wrong people
Burned ourselves out with lust and love and loving alcohol
And other substances?
Using to get back there – to the way it was before
our emotions grew up and out of our skins – too potent for our physical bodies
Too capricious to tie down on just one man
Choking poisonous vines
What will we do, when we drown our lovers with our tears,
Smother them with our paper poetry, fleshy limbs and
Beat them with our beating hearts?

The actress stands on the edge of the stage
Eyes closed, she's on the ledge of a building
She is all our emotions
Magnified
And played out in a storyboard sequence
Skipping our stone hearts across the water
Beating them like hollow drums
Never mind the lipstick
She is you (she is me)
Before we stopped trusting our own voices
(now my mind is a cast of schizophrenic players
Who all wear my face )
And listened to the ones we're to become

 Louise Brooks; showgirl and silent film actress. I used to have hair like hers, but she pulls it off way better than I did. Sexy as.